PI4ZLB

Communicating with space-based ham radio satellites might sound like it’s something that takes a lot of money, but in reality it’s one of the more accessible aspects of the hobby. Generally all that’s needed is a five-watt handheld transceiver and a directional antenna. Like most things in the ham radio world, though, it takes a certain amount of skill which can’t be easily purchased. Most hams using satellites like these will rely on some software to help track them, which is where this new program from [Alex Shovkoplyas] comes in.

The open source application is called SkyRoof and provides a number of layers of information about satellites aggregated into a single information feed. A waterfall diagram is central to the display, with not only the satellite communications shown on the plot but information about the satellites themselves. From there the user can choose between a number of other layers of information about the satellites including their current paths, future path prediction, and a few different ways of displaying all of this information. The software also interfaces with radios via CAT control, and can even automatically correct for the Doppler shift that is so often found in satellite radio communications.

For any ham actively engaged in satellite tracking or space-based repeater communications, this tool is certainly worth trying out. Unfortunately, it’s only available for Windows currently. For those not looking to operate under Microsoft’s thumb, projects such as DragonOS do a good job of collecting up the must-have Linux programs for hams and other radio enthusiasts.

Software Defined Radio (SDR) is the big thing these days, and why not? A single computer can get rid of a room full of boat anchors, and give you better signal discrimination than all but the best kit. Any SDR project needs an RF receiver, and in this project [mircemk] used a single 6J1 vaccum tube to produce an SSB SDR that combines the best of old and new. 

Single-tube radios are a classic hack, and where a lot of hams got started back in the day, but there is a reason more complicated circuits tend to be used. On the other hand, if you can throw a PC worth of signal processing at the output, it looks like you can get a very sensitive and selective single-sideband (SSB) receiver.

The 6J1 tube is convenient, since it can run on only 6 V (or down to 3.7 as [mircemk] demonstrates). Here it is used as a mixer, with the oscillator signal injected via the screen grid. Aside from that, the simple circuit consists of a receiving coil, a few resistors and a variable capacitor. How well does it work? Quite well, when paired with a PC; you can judge for yourself in the video embedded below.

We’ve featured a lot of [mircemk]’s projects over the years, like this handsome OLED VU meter, or this frequency analyzer with a VFD  and even a virtual pinball cabinet made from scraps, among many others.

Usually when we see a project using a software-defined radio (SDR), the SDR’s inputs and outputs are connected to antennae, but [FromConceptToCircuit]’s project connected an ADALM-Pluto SDR to an RF bridge and a few passive components to make a surprisingly effective network analyzer (part two of the video).

The network analyzer measures two properties of the circuit to which it is connected: return loss (S11) and insertion gain or loss (S21). To measure S21, the SDR feeds a series of tones to the device under test, and reads the device’s output from one of the SDR’s inputs. By comparing the amplitude of the input to the device’s output, a Python program can calculate S21 over the range of tested frequencies. To find S11, [FromConceptToCircuit] put an RF bridge in line with the device being tested and connected the bridge’s output to the SDR’s second input. This allowed the program to calculate the device’s impedance, and from that S11.
The RF bridge and other components introduce some inaccuracies to the measurements, so before making any other measurements, the system is calibrated with both a through connection and an open circuit in place of the tested device. The RF bridge’s directivity was the biggest limiting factor; transfer back from the bridge’s output line caused the reflection under load to exceed the reflection of an open circuit in some frequency ranges, at which point the analyzer couldn’t accurately operate.

[FromConceptToCircuit] was eventually able to make measurements throughout most of the 0.1-3 GHz range with a dynamic range of at least 10 dB, and expects a more directive RF bridge to give even better results. If you’d like to repeat the experiment, he’s made his Python program available on GitHub.

We’ve previously seen [FromConceptToCircuit] use the Pluto SDR to make a spectrum analyzer. We’ve also featured a guide to the Pluto, covered a project that improved its frequency stability, and seen it used to transmit video.

The ARRL used to have a requirement that any antenna advertised in their publications had to have real-world measurements accompanying it, to back up any claims of extravagant performance. I’m told that nowadays they will accept computer simulations instead, but it remains true that knowing what your antenna does rather than just thinking you know what it does gives you an advantage. I was reminded of this by a recent write-up in which the performance of a mylar sheet as a ground plane was tested at full power with a field strength meter, because about a decade ago I set out to characterise an antenna using real-world measurements and readily available equipment. I was in a sense field testing it, so of course the first step of the process was to find a field. A real one, with cows.

Walking Round And Round A Field In The Name Of Science

The process I was intending to follow was simple enough. Set up the antenna in the middle of the field, have it transmit some RF, and measure the signal strength at points along a series of radial lines away from it I’d end up with a spreadsheet, from which I could make a radial plot that would I hoped, give me a diagram showing its performance. It’s a rough and ready methodology, but given a field and a sunny afternoon, not one that should be too difficult.

I was more interested in the process than the antenna, so I picked up my trusty HB9CV two-element 144MHz antenna that I’ve stood and pointed at the ISS many times to catch SSTV transmissions. It’s made from two phased half-wave radiators, but it can be seen as something similar to a two-element Yagi array. I ran a long mains lead oput to a plastic garden table with the HB9CV attached, and set up a Raspberry Pi whose clock would produce the RF.

My receiver would be an Android tablet with an RTL-SDR receiver. That’s pretty sensitive for this purpose, so my transmitter would have to be extremely low powered. Ideally I would want no significant RF to make it beyond the boundary of the field, so I gave the Pi a resistive attenuator network designed to give an output of around 0.03 mW, or 30 μW. A quick bit of code to send my callsign as CW periodically to satisfy my licence conditions, and I was off with the tablet and a pen and paper. Walking round the field in a polar grid wasn’t as easy as it might seem, but I had a very long tape measure to help me.

A Lot Of Work To Tell Me What I Already Knew

I ended up with a page of figures, and then a spreadsheet which I’m amused to still find in the depths of my project folder. It contains a table of angles of incidence to the antenna versus metres from the antenna, and the data points are the figure in (uncalibrated) mV that the SDR gave me for the carrier at that point. The resulting polar plot shows the performace of the antenna at each angle, and unsurprisingly I proved to myself that a HB9CV is indeed a directional antenna.

My experiment was in itself not of much use other than to prove to myself I could characterise an antenna with extremely basic equipment. But then again it’s possible that in times past this might have been a much more difficult task, so knowing I can do it at all is an interesting conclusion.

The world’s militaries have always been at the forefront of communications technology. From trumpets and drums to signal flags and semaphores, anything that allows a military commander to relay orders to troops in the field quickly or call for reinforcements was quickly seized upon and optimized. So once radio was invented, it’s little wonder how quickly military commanders capitalized on it for field communications.

Radiotelegraph systems began showing up as early as the First World War, but World War II was the first real radio war, with every belligerent taking full advantage of the latest radio technology. Chief among these developments was the ability of signals in the high-frequency (HF) bands to reflect off the ionosphere and propagate around the world, an important capability when prosecuting a global war.

But not long after, in the less kinetic but equally dangerous Cold War period, military planners began to see the need to move more information around than HF radio could support while still being able to do it over the horizon. What they needed was the higher bandwidth of the higher frequencies, but to somehow bend the signals around the curvature of the Earth. What they came up with was a fascinating application of practical physics: meteor burst communications.

Blame It on Shannon

In practical terms, a radio signal that can carry enough information to be useful for digital communications while still being able to propagate long distances is a bit of a paradox. You can thank Claude Shannon for that, after he developed the idea of channel capacity from the earlier work of Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley. The resulting Hartley-Shannon Theorem states that the bit rate of a channel in a noisy environment is directly related to the bandwidth of the channel. In other words, the more data you want to stuff down a channel, the higher the frequency needs to be.

Unfortunately, that runs afoul of the physics of ionospheric propagation. Thanks to the physics of the interaction between radio waves and the charged particles between about 50 km and 600 km above the ground, the maximum frequency that can be reflected back toward the ground is about 30 MHz, which is the upper end of the HF band. Beyond that is the very-high frequency (VHF) band from 30 MHz to 300 MHz, which has enough bandwidth for an effective data channel but to which the ionosphere is essentially transparent.

Luckily, the ionosphere isn’t the only thing capable of redirecting radio waves. Back in the 1920s, Japanese physicist Hantaro Nagaoka observed that the ionospheric propagation of shortwave radio signals would change a bit during periods of high meteoric activity. That discovery largely remained dormant until after World War II, when researchers picked up on Nagoka’s work and looked into the mechanism behind his observations.

Every day, the Earth sweeps up a huge number of meteoroids; estimates range from a million to ten billion. Most of those are very small, on the order of a few nanograms, with a few good-sized chunks in the tens of kilograms range mixed in. But the ones that end up being most interesting for communications purposes are the particles in the milligram range, in part because there are about 100 million such collisions on average every day, but also because they tend to vaporize in the E-level of the ionosphere, between 80 and 120 km above the surface. The air at that altitude is dense enough to turn the incoming cosmic debris into a long, skinny trail of ions, but thin enough that the free electrons take a while to recombine into neutral atoms. It’s a short time — anywhere between 500 milliseconds to a few seconds — but it’s long enough to be useful.

The other aspect of meteor trails formed at these altitudes that makes them useful for communications is their relative reflectivity. The E-layer of the ionosphere normally has on the order of 10⁷ electrons per cubic meter, a density that tends to refract radio waves below about 20 MHz. But meteor trails at this altitude can have densities as high as 10¹¹ to 10¹² electrons/m³. This makes the trails highly reflective to radio waves, especially at the higher frequencies of the VHF band.

In addition to the short-lived nature of meteor trails, daily and seasonal variations in the number of meteors complicate their utility for communications. The rotation of the Earth on its axis accounts for the diurnal variation, which tends to peak around dawn local time every day as the planet’s rotation and orbit are going in the same direction and the number of collisions increases. Seasonal variations occur because of the tilt of Earth’s axis relative to the plane of the ecliptic, where most meteoroids are concentrated. More collisions occur when the Earth’s axis is pointed in the direction of travel around the Sun, which is the second half of the year for the northern hemisphere.

Learning to Burst

Building a practical system that leverages these highly reflective but short-lived and variable mirrors in the sky isn’t easy, as shown by several post-war experimental systems. The first of these was attempted by the National Bureau of Standards in 1951. They set up a system between Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Sterling, Virginia, a path length of about 1250 km. Originally built to study propagation phenomena such as forward scatter and sporadic E, the researchers noticed significant effects on their tests by meteor trails. This made them switch their focus to meteor trails, which caught the attention of the US Air Force. They were in the market for a four-channel continuous teletype link to their base in Thule, Greenland. They got it, but only just barely, thanks to the limited technology of the time. The NBS system also used the Iowa to Virginia system to study higher data rates by pointing highly directional rhombic antennas at each end of the connection at the same small patch of sky. They managed a whopping data rate of 3,200 bits per second with this system, but only for the second or so that a meteor trail happened to appear.

The successes and failures of the NBS system made it clear that a useful system based on meteor trails would need to operate in burst mode, to jam data through the link for as long as it existed and wait for the next one. The NBS tested a burst-mode system in 1958 that used the 50-MHz band and offered a full-duplex link at 2,400 bits per second. The system used magnetic tape loops to buffer data and transmitters at both ends of the link that operated continually to probe for a path. Whenever the receiver at one end detected a sufficiently strong probe signal from the other end, the transmitter would start sending data. The Canadians got in on the MBC action with their JANET system, which had a similar dedicated probing channel and tape buffer. In 1954 they established a full-duplex teletype link between Ottawa and Nova Scotia at 1,300 bits per second with an error rate of only 1.5%

In the late 1950s, Hughes developed a single-channel air-to-ground MBC system. This was a significant development since not only had the equipment gotten small enough to install on an airplane but also because it really refined the burst-mode technology. The ground stations in the Hughes system periodically transmitted a 100-bit interrogation signal to probe for a path to the aircraft. The receiver on the ground listened for an acknowledgement from the plane, which turned the channel around and allowed the airborne transmitter to send a 100-bit data burst. The system managed a respectable 2,400 bps data rate, but suffered greatly from ground-based interference for TV stations and automotive ignition noise.

The SHAPE of Things to Come

The first major MBC system fielded during the Cold War was the Communications by Meteor Trails system, or COMET. It was used by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to link its far-flung outposts in member nations with Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, or SHAPE, located in Belgium. COMET took cues from the Hughes system, especially its error detection and correction scheme. COMET was a robust and effective MBC system that provided between four and eight teletype circuits depending on daily and seasonal conditions, each handling 60 words per minute.

COMET was in continuous use from the mid-1960s until well after the official end of the Cold War. By that point, secure satellite communications were nowhere near as prohibitively expensive as they had been at the beginning of the Space Age, and MBC systems became less critical to NATO. They weren’t retired, though, and COMET actually still exists, although rebranded as “Compact Over-the-Horizon Mobile Expeditionary Terminal.” These man-portable systems don’t use MBC; rather, they use high-power UHF and microwave transmitters to scatter signals off the troposphere. A small amount of the signal is reflected back to the ground, where high-gain antennas pick up the vanishingly weak signals.

Although not directly related to Cold War communications, it’s worth noting that there was a very successful MBC system fielded in the civilian space in the United States: SNOTEL. We’ve covered this system in some depth already, but briefly, it’s a network of stations in the western part of the USA with the critical job of monitoring the snowpack. A commercial MBC system connected the solar-powered monitoring stations, often in remote and rugged locations, to two different central bases. Taking advantage of diurnal meteor variations, each morning the master station would send a polling signal out to every remote, which would then send back the previous day’s data once a return path was opened. The system could collect data from 180 remote sites in just 20 minutes. It operated successfully from the mid-1970s until just recently, when pervasive cell technology and cheap satellite modems made the system obsolete.

One of the first things that an amateur radio operator is likely to do once receiving their license is grab a dual-band handheld and try to make contacts with a local repeater. After the initial contacts, though, many hams move on to more technically challenging aspects of the hobby. One of those being activating space-based repeaters instead of their terrestrial counterparts. [saveitforparts] takes a look at some more esoteric uses of these radio systems in his latest video.

There are plenty of satellite repeaters flying around the world that are actually legal for hams to use, with most being in low-Earth orbit and making quick passes at predictable times. But there are others, generally operated by the world’s militaries, that are in higher geostationary orbits which allows them to serve a specific area continually. With a specialized three-dimensional Yagi-Uda antenna on loan, [saveitforparts] listens in on some of these signals. Some of it is presumably encrypted military activity, but there’s also some pirate radio and state propaganda stations.

There are a few other types of radio repeaters operating out in space as well, and not all of them are in geostationary orbit. Turning the antenna to the north, [saveitforparts] finds a few Russian satellites in an orbit specifically designed to provide polar regions with a similar radio service. These sometimes will overlap with terrestrial radio like TV or air traffic control and happily repeat them at brief intervals.

[saveitforparts] has plenty of videos looking at other satellite communications, including grabbing images from Russian weather satellites, using leftover junk to grab weather data from geostationary orbit, and accessing the Internet via satellite with 80s-era technology.

We’ve seen tons of projects lately using the ESP32-C3, and for good reason. The microcontroller has a lot to offer, and the current crop of tiny dev boards sporting it make adding a lot of compute power to even the smallest projects dead easy. Not so nice, though, is the poor WiFi performance of some of these boards, which [Peter Neufeld] addresses with this quick and easy antenna.

There are currently a lot of variations of the ESP32-C3 out there, sometimes available for a buck a piece from the usual suspects. Designs vary, but a lot of them seem to sport a CA-C03 ceramic chip antenna at one end of the board to save space. Unfortunately, the lack of free space around the antenna makes for poor RF performance. [Peter]’s solution is a simple antenna made from a 31-mm length of silver wire. One end of the wire is formed into a loop by wrapping it around a 5-mm drill bit and bending it perpendicular to the remaining tail. The loop is then opened up a bit so it can bridge the length of the ceramic chip antenna and then soldered across it. That’s all it takes to vastly improve performance as measured by [Peter]’s custom RSSI logger — anywhere from 6 to 10 dBm better. You don’t even need to remove the OEM antenna.

The video below, by [Circuit Helper], picks up on [Peter]’s work and puts several antenna variants to further testing. He gets similarly dramatic results, with 20 dBm improvement in some cases. He does note that the size of the antenna can be a detriment to a project that needs a really compact MCU and tries coiling up the antenna, with limited success. He also did a little testing to come up with an optimal length of 34 mm for the main element of the antenna.

There seems to be a lot of room for experimentation here. We wonder how mounting the antenna with the loop perpendicular to the board and the main element sticking out lengthwise would work. We’d love to hear about your experiments, so make sure to ping us with your findings.